Miss Laura Cook, from Pennsylvania did me the honour of writing
this short story for my blog. She writes a blog herself and is quite good at
it, though she may say otherwise. Check her blog out here.
Thank you so much Laura. I loved reading this short story and I
hope you readers will too.
The Bilge Master
rabbit heart
She is a slight girl, nervous and
pale, so easy to ignore that she is almost struck by a car as she crosses the
street to the clinic. The driver notices her at the last second and hits the
brakes hard. He leans out of his window and bellows.
“Why don’t you get out of the road,
you slack-jawed idiot?”
He’s right, at least par
tially. She is indeed in the road—smack-dab in the middle of
his lane—and she is looking somewhat slack-jawed at the moment, frozen in the
glare of his headlights. Her mind had shut down the second she had seen him
coming: any thoughts of running or dodging vanished, replaced by a morbid
fascination that forced her to stare, empty-minded, at the headlights rushing
ever closer. It is good for her that he stopped, as she would not have moved
from the spot until he hit her.
Now, she blinks and the trance is
broken. She steps politely out of the man’s way and makes a vague wave down the
road, indicating his clear path. The driver rolls his eyes, steps on the gas,
and roars out of sight.
She fixes her gaze again on the
clinic across the street, her goal the first time she had stepped from the
sidewalk. Midas Health Clinic, the
sign reads in a businesslike gold font. Health
clinic: a somewhat euphemistic—or at least purposefully ambiguous—name for
a place with a clearly defined purpose. Even though everyone knows what the
clinic is for, and what the people who go there desire.
She takes a deep breath, trying to
steady her rapid heartbeat, and places a hand over the offending organ. Here it
is: the last moment with her old self. She will not miss it. Trying to embody
the ideals of her new persona, she boldly crosses the street, intentionally
neglecting to look both ways.
midas
The surgeon glances only
perfunctorily at the papers bearing the girl’s signature before turning away
and snapping on his face mask. He trusts that she knows what she’s getting
into; there is a mountain of reading assigned before the patient can sign away
their rights to their heart. If she didn’t read it, it’s her own fault, her own
organs, her own body that’s affected.
He readies
the pills, a blue pill and a white one, and a plastic cup of water and sets
them on the fold-out table next to the operating chair. The pills join a silver
hand mirror on the table. The surgeon steps back and surveys the still life,
then moves the mirror half an inch to the right. There. Just so.
He is a
particular man; he has to have the painting of the skyline on the wall
perfectly straight, his operating room perfectly clean, his surgeries perfectly
executed. This clinic is run to his exacting standards, each action timed like
clockwork. He has his eccentricities; of course, the patients do as well. They
come in here expecting complete confidentiality, which is, to be frank, a bit
of a pointless expectation. The surgeon can see their faces, even if they can’t
see his—to speak nothing of the many casual observers who may have witnessed
the patients entering the clinic. The surgeon knows their names, and he knows
their faces, and if ever anyone famous entered the clinic, the surgeon would
have enough information on that person and their chosen surgery to ruin their
career forever.
But he
doesn’t. This is because he truly doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about his
patients beyond the money that they pay him and the way each successful surgery
bolsters his personal statistics. What these pathetic people do with their
hearts is immaterial to him, and if the surgery works out for them, or if it
doesn’t—what does it matter? He counts the surgery as a success if the patient
doesn’t die in his chair. How soon they die after they leave the chair is their
problem, not his.
Their
problem, just as it is the problem of the trembling girl who enters his room
now. He can see why she has requested a transplant—her bowed head, quivering
fingers, and pallid complexion clearly show what type of heart she has.
Something timid. Kitten, maybe, or fawn. Perhaps rabbit.
He checks
the papers again. Yes, rabbit. How unfortunate.
It’s not
unfortunate that she has a rabbit heart; the world needs rabbits, just as it
needs wolves like himself, or monkeys, or groundhogs. It’s unfortunate that she
is so unsatisfied with her lot in life as to come here and pay for a different
kind of heart. Every patient that enters his room is unfortunate. But, again,
that’s their problem, not his.
“Sit down,”
he tells her, and when she is settled into the chair, he hands her the silver
hand mirror, shined to a high gloss. “This is your looking glass. Look within.”
(This
script has been drafted and edited over hundreds of surgeries. He has to make
an effort to keep the boredom from his voice, as he has been told that such a
momentous occasion in a patient’s life must be accorded a small bit of
ceremony.)
“This is
the last time that you will see yourself as a rabbit-hearted girl. When you
wake, you will be…” He checks the paper again surreptitiously, having already
forgotten the rabbit girl’s choice of new heart. “A lion.”
The rabbit
girl smiles widely. It is a pathetic smile, the way it lights up her
translucent face from the inside. Girls like that shouldn’t have an inner glow.
She’s too forgettable, too frail. What a waste.
He takes
the hand mirror from her and replaces it with the cup and the white pill.
“Drink up,” he says with a sarcastic smile, though she can see nothing but the
smallest glimpse of his eyes, thanks to the face mask. His voice sounds sincere
enough, he thinks.
The girl
swallows the pill eagerly.
rabbit heart
She is spinning. Slipping out of
time. What’s going on? She feels like she’s falling, unable to catch her
footing. Was that the wrong pill to take? It can’t have been. The doctor handed
it to her. Didn’t he? Did she pick it up? That would be just like her, to pick
up the wrong pill. Too timid to ask which one was right, too stupid to know the
answer, too flighty to be sure of her choice. This is why she can’t stand her
rabbit heart. This is why she wants to be a lion.
Her vision
swims. She appears to be looking at the ceiling tiles. But is it? She can’t
tell. With immense effort, she lifts up her head and finds the opposite wall
with her eyes. There’s the painting, the one with the city skyline on it.
Pretty painting. It’s a nice—
The
doctor’s face interrupts her thoughts as it blocks her view of the painting.
His face, or what she can see of it, consists of two small slits: his eyes. If only I could see your face, she
thinks. I thought I wanted anonymity, but
the mask isn’t you. I can’t find you. I can’t find you?
The doctor withdraws and she
rushes towards the skyline.
midas
Stupid girl. Not only is she
willingly killing herself here in this operating room, but she’s wasting
precious time by not going under right away. She seems to be out now, though,
so he can get started replacing her rabbit heart with a lion’s.
Willingly
killing herself. That’s what she is doing, if she read the papers she was
supposed to read before she signed. If she read, then she knows that your body
has to be receptive to the new heart in order for it to take. Your body has to
be of the same type. That’s why the
rabbit girl is going to die—a less likely lion he has never seen in his life.
That’s why so many of his patients die. Anyone desperate enough to pay
thousands of dollars for a new heart has to be pretty unhappy with their old
one. And if they read, then they would know that the old heart is what’s
keeping them alive, and their new one will kill them, because what they want so
urgently is a complete change.
Did she
read the papers? If she did, why is she here? Maybe she thinks she’ll be
different. Maybe they all think they’ll be different.
As he has
been thinking, he has been cutting. This surgery is so routine these days that
he can do one by himself in an hour or two. The surgeon turns from the patient
to pick up her new lion heart. He holds it up above her chest, and some
sentimental feeling tugs at the bottom of his own wolf heart. Poor girl.Walked
in here to her own death. All she wanted was to not be a rabbit anymore.
He
brandishes the lion heart at her and whispers, “This is a gift. And like any
gift, it has a price.” He watches her face for a sign of a reaction, but she
is, of course, unconscious.
His rubber
gloves turn from blue to red as he holds the heart over his patient. It is an
anticlimactic moment. Embarrassed at this unprecedented show of weakness, the
surgeon shakes his head and returns to connecting the new heart to the girl’s
veins: the origin of a river that will course too swiftly through her body,
surely killing her.
Why should
he care? She read the papers.
lion heart
She wakes, groggy and
disoriented. Despite the confusing way her head is spinning, she feels
different. She feels strong, brave, ready for a fight. She smiles with glee as
she gazes, once again, at the ceiling tiles. She is a lion, the queen of the
savannah, the top of the food chain. No longer will she freeze in the middle of
the road as a car bears down on her. She will walk on by, paying no attention
to the rude driver and his ugly behemoth of a vehicle. The queen of the
savannah stops for no one.
“Thank
you,” she says to the doctor as she exits the operating room. She can feel the
robust pulse of her heart beneath the thin skin of her chest. Without looking
in the hand mirror, she knows that she looks transformed, illuminated from the
inside. Her glow is permanent now.
So she
thanks the doctor. “Thank you,” she says. “This is truly a gift.”
midas
It comes with a price, he thinks. But he smiles behind the mask and
shakes her hand, as he has been trained to do.
lion heart
There is a pain in her chest as
she leaves the clinic. The lion-hearted girl sways on her feet briefly before
shaking her head to clear her thoughts and carrying on, as a lion ought to do.
Of course there’s pain, she tells
herself. I just had surgery.
I’m different. I will be different.
